June 22, 2007
Our Vast Cultural Wasteland
Mark Bauerlein pointed earlier this week to a speech by Dana Gioia — his former boss at the National Endowment for the Arts. Speaking at Stanford’s commencement, Gioia bemoans that we live in a culture that “barely acknowledges and rarely celebrates the arts or artists.” As a child, he first encountered Robert Frost, John Steinbeck, Duke Ellington, and Arthur Rubinstein on general-interest television shows: “I don’t think that Americans were smarter then, but American culture was…. Today no working-class or immigrant kid would encounter that range of arts and ideas in the popular culture. Almost everything in our national culture, even the news, has been reduced to entertainment, or altogether eliminated.”
Hold on a minute. At the Unofficial Stanford Blog, you’ll find a contrarian view on all this. It boils down to this: Gioia’s remembering the good stuff because that’s what’s memorable and comparing it to our everyday dreck. Serious authors appear on The Daily Show. Shows like Lost are rich and complicated. And Oprah’s Book Club, for all its faults, isn’t “completely intellectually destitute.”
Scott Smallwood | Posted on Friday June 22, 2007 | PermalinkComments
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There are no belles lettres in America. No little magazines like Noonday and Evergreen Review. Not even general interest magazines like Atlantic. (The name is still there, but the content is not.) In fact, “general interest” is not of general interest.
— David McCullough Jun 22, 03:32 PM #
Yes, it’s not fair to compare “what endured” from prior ages with anything- and-everything from today. Except for specialists, we’ve forgotten the cheap broadsheets from the first hundred years of printing that made up ninety-five percent of the press’s production. We remember the few classics that survived.
Most TV shows today are crap, as they always have been; yet the very best shows, like CSI and a few others, are better than TV has ever been, not to mention better than most of today’s films. When film classics like Double Indemnity were being produced, most film fare was made up of deservedly-forgotten B-movies. It took awhile for films like It’s a Wonderful Life to be recognized as classics.
In short, the once-despised (by now-forgotten trendy theorists) process of “canon-formation” is always going on, as Eliot correctly said in regard to poetry. We’re too close to our own age to handicap all the classics of today, in all media, but although media change and the proportion of quality goes up and down, our age will have its own heritage. Johnson said that the test of artistic quality is “what pleases many and pleases long” – but with the proviso that at least a few generations have to go by before these things get sorted out.
— David Murray Jun 23, 11:33 AM #
Gee, why are we becoming dumber? Maybe because we have the executioners evaluated by the soon to be executed! Lets eliminate faculty based on whether a person right out of high school likes them or not. Maybe its time for the admin to get out of their ivy covered offices and evaluate faculty themselves and base their promotion on that evalutation. Students aren’t ready nor are they qualified.
— MLM Jun 23, 04:34 PM #
Gioia’s argument is not exactly new. This argument has been made for generations. Perhaps what is new is that we are living in an information age. As a result, I find that some of our youth are particularly non-naïve and sophisticated.
— Jeffrey T. Guterman Jun 24, 03:00 PM #
Yes, television has for many years now been referred to as a vast intellectual waste land. Newton Minnow, wasn’t it? But there have always been stand out exceptions to that rule. I tend to agree with Gioia. Not only does it seem like there are far fewer examples of thought provoking adult or children’s programs, but this is occuring while the available numbers of broadcast outlets is vastly increasing. The most disappointing broadcasters seem to be the old stand bys on the dial between channels 2 and 13. Is there any reasonable data collection that’s been done which tries to operationally define ‘cultural programming” and then measure its relative occurrence then and now?
— Jack Jun 24, 07:39 PM #
Gioia’s point was, I think, different than the Stanford blog makes out. He refers to his own childhood not because he wants to “remember the best” of it, thereby forgetting all the dreck that accompanied it. He wants to show that there was more acceptance and presentation of good art and artists on average, middle-brow shows than there is today. Even for a poor kid in a bad neighborhood, as Gioia was, the TV displayed Robert Frost et al as simply part of the general cultural field.
That commonality is what has been lost. Yes, there are exceptions. Jon Stewart and Colbert have important authors on their shows (although the discussions always seem rushed and compacted), and Oprah’s Book Club is an admirable thing. But that kind of exposure is a far smaller proportion of mass culture than it used to be, in part simply because of the proliferation of channels and connections. The integration of high into mass has deteriorated. Just compare the music of old cartoons (opera, classic and romantic symphonies, etc.) with the music of cartoon shows today.
— Mark Bauerlein Jun 25, 05:49 AM #